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Barbara Foster at Contemporary Print media Research Center

Barbara Foster will be working on her new print projects at the center from April 17 through May 26, 2017.

Within an archeological context, she bridges environmental and ecological issues using a personal approach combining traditional and non-traditional processes. During her residency, she will be exploring the UCSC Natural Reserves and working with UCSC students.

Artist Bio — Barbara Foster

Barbara Foster was educated at UC Santa Barbara and San Francisco State University then trained as a professional printer thus developing a strong sense of the place that printmaking has in the visual arts. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award- Taiwan, 2014. She will continue collaborative ventures in traditional and non-traditional technologies in print and drawing that lie at the heart of her studio practice, stretching content and process to address critical issues and intellectual pursuits.

Barbara Foster is widely recognized for her innovative prints. She has exhibited her prints at institutions in the US and abroad, and has completed artist residencies at the Frans Masereel Centre in Belgium, the Phillip Institute of Technology in Australia, the Kala Art Institute, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside, CA, the Prairie Center of the Arts in Peoria, Illinois, the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, and Playa Oregon. The Paper Trees prints were developed for and shown in Digital Mixed Media at the Bumpodo Gallery in Tokyo. Other exhibitions include Tracing Journeys: Mapping as Metaphor at the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art in Montana, Mapping the Imagination, The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, Cross Cuts: The Contemporary Woodcut, Kala Art Institute, to name a few. Her work is in the collections of the Awagami Paper Factory, Machida Print Museum, Japan, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu and most recently The National Library of the Netherlands at The Hague.

Over the past fifteen years her work has addressed the fragility of the landscape, whether it is the Nevada proving grounds, deep-sea terrain, corporate agriculture, Taiwan urban gardens, or the planting and harvesting of trees as a way of looking at the resurrection of the previously blighted or the implications of the unpredictable. In 2016 Barbara was invited to participate in a residency at the Sagehen Field Station, operated by UC Berkeley. Sagehen and the Art and Environment Center at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada designed this residency. New work and process has been integrated into Barbara’s prints and practice. In 1980, Barbara Foster & Jack Stone launched WesternWedge as a traditional print atelier, printing for artists Bryan Rogers, Margo Humphrey, John Ihle, and Wes Christensen to name a few. Disbanded in 2016, WesternWedge had evolved into what is best described as an intellectual umbrella covering a diverse range of artistic activities. Our website tag line captured our collaborative mindset: Experimentation is an intrinsic part of the arts; art owes its future to past innovations.